This Week In Quotes: Double Edition (Dec 22 – Jan 5)

Last chance for light bulbs. Make sure you’ve got enough to last a lifetime… with extras to leave to your children and grandchildren… so that they can know that once there was light… and it was a warm light… there were bulbs that glowed. And the heartless government, which had no feeling for warmth and glow, took those bulbs away. — Althouse

Kent Sorenson personally told me he was offered a large sum of money to go to work for the Paul campaign. Kent said to me yesterday that ‘everyone sells out in Iowa, why shouldn’t I,’ then he told me he would stay with our campaign. The Ron Paul campaign has to answer for its actions. — Michele Bachmann

All I’ll say is that I’ll be prepared Wednesday morning in New Hampshire to draw a clear contrast between conservatism and the Romney record, which was to not be for Reagan in the 1980s; to be a Democrat for Paul Tsongas in 1992, when Tsongas was the most liberal candidate; to run to the left of Teddy Kennedy in 1994, which was not an easy thing to do; to describe himself as a moderate running for governor in 2002; to have tax-paid abortion in Romneycare; to have Planned Parenthood written by law into Romneycare as a key decider with no right to life group, by the way. And we’ll just go through how wide the gap is between conservatism and the Massachusetts moderate policies that Romney in the real world, not in his campaign speeches or his paid ads, but in the real world, the moderate Massachusetts positions that he has espoused for his entire career. — Newt Gingrich

“No, I feel ‘Romney-boated.” — Newt Gingrich after being asked if he was swift boated in Iowa

I’ve told people that I think Mitt Romney is the ‘Denny’s’ of the Republican field. And here’s what I mean by that. Denny’s is not the restaurant you jump in the car and say, ‘Honey, it’s our anniversary. Let’s go to ‘Denny’s.’ But ‘Denny’s’ is the place that when everything else is closed, or you just want to go someplace where you know what you’re going to get and it’s going to be priced in a way that you can afford it … ‘OK, we’ll go to Denny’s. — Mike Huckabee

It seems the more establishment piles on, Dole, McCain, all the rest, nobody cares. Nobody cares about this. I mean, none of the endorsements that Romney picked up have been a thing in terms of how people respond, because the people are looking for a new generation of leadership. They’re looking for a new approach to problem solving in this country. You can get all the Doles and McCains in the world as Romney probably will, but in the end, nobody cares. — Jon Huntsman

Change has come to National Review. It was and is inevitable. The question is, what kind of change? And simply put, as Brent Bozell indicated, there is an uneasy feeling the change at NR — as indicated by the Gingrich editorial — is that William Buckley’s defiantly against-the-wind conservative masterpiece has gone GOP Establishment. — Jeffrey Lord

I submit that it is the blackness of Michelle Obama that gives credibility to the “blackness” of Obama. This is one of the dirty little secrets white people remain ignorant of, because to accept what I am saying as fact would require them to also acknowledge the depth of contempt many blacks harbor toward them. …Over-the-top expensive vacations, fashions, and dinners — in the view of many blacks — is seen as showing whiteys what it’s all about. It is viewed with applause and admiration because it is viewed through a racial paradigm. — Mychal Massie

So right now, he sends these young kids over there to endure the danger, and the kids coming back, the young people coming back and the ones in the military right now, they overwhelmingly support my campaign. We get twice as much support from active military personnel than all the other candidates put together. So, Newt Gingrich has no business talking about danger because he is putting other people in danger. Some people call that kind of a program a chickenhawk and I think he falls into that category,. — Ron Paul

You got a name? You got a name? You got a name? If you don’t have a name to tell me, this individual said this and I don’t take that as a corroborated source. I do take a little offense when you run a story and you can’t tell me who is saying something that you’re using as a negative story, so you know don’t come to me and say respond to this and you’re either not willing or I don’t have a name. — Rick Perry

He’s not a little weird, he’s really weird. And some of his positions that he has taken are just so weird that I think that some Republicans are off-put. Not everybody is not going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the stillborn child. It was a body that they took home to kind of sleep with it, introduce it to the rest of the family. It’s a very weird story. — Eugene Robinson

I’m happy to stand by the things I believe. I’m not going to change my positions by virtue of being in a presidential campaign. What we did was right for the people of Massachusetts. (Romneycare) is still favored there by 3:1 – and it is fundamentally a conservative principle because the people take personal responsibility rather than turning to the government for free care. — Mitt Romney on Romneycare

Why would Ann Coulter criticize me for voting against the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill? I mean, Ann, should I have voted for amnesty? Should I have voted for comprehensive immigration reform? Because if that’s what you’re saying, then, doesn’t sound like you’re the real conservative here. I think when Jim DeMint and every conservative in the United States Senate voted against the McCain-Kennedy bill – yes, we voted against E-Verify, but we voted against a pretty bad bill that I think, at least you said you were againstt. — Rick Santorum

After all, at the end of 2010, we elected Republicans in a Congressional landslide. President Obama was on the rocks thanks to charting a committed course of spending, spending and more spending. Most of all, the voting populace seemed to understand for the first time in 60 years that not only is there no such thing as a free lunch, but the man who offers the free lunch expects your firstborn child in return. Government, we realized, was Rumpelstiltskin rather than Santa Claus. — Ben Shapiro

If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: it’s run out of other people, period. Greece is a land of ever-fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government. How do you grow your economy in an ever-shrinking market? — Mark Steyn

A few days before Christmas, we sailed across the psychological Rubicon and joined the club of nations whose government debt now exceeds their total GDP. It barely raised a murmur – and those who took the trouble to address the issue noted complacently that our 100% debt-to-GDP ratio is a mere two-thirds of Greece’s. — Mark Steyn